The legend of Stompin' Tom: Dave Bidini bids farewell to a Canadian icon

Stompin Tom Connors dead: Remembering the Hockey Song legend

Stompin’ Tom Connors lived an impossible life; a life born from an impossible fiction where a single man affects so many despite having been raised with so little. As a toddler, Tom begged for change with his unwed teenage mother on the dirty St. John streets. Later, he was orphaned out to a family in Skinner’s Pond, P.E.I., but ran away a few years later, barely a boy, with no sense of where or why or how. For the first twenty years of his life, he was a lonely spirit drifting through the crushing nowhere of Canada in the fifties and sixties. He worked in the mines; he rode in the boxcars. Then, one Manitoba afternoon — at least I think it was Manitoba; with Tom, the stories blur into each other because there are so many of them — he met two school teachers. He’d started to play a little guitar — mostly American songs and some British, Irish and Scottish traditionals — and the school teachers asked him, “Why aren’t there any songs about Canada?” Tom had no good answer, so he wrote one. Then he wrote another. 61 albums later, the street urchin who never knew his father — knowing his mother barely more — would pass into the ether as the single most devoted Canadian artist of all time.

As a figure in contemporary pop music, no one dared risk expressing defiance and anger the way Stompin’ Tom did; this coming at a time when it was all about ‘making it’ and ‘wooing American radio’

In a final message to fans released after his death on Wednesday night, Canadian country music star Stompin’ Tom Connors issued an appeal for Canadians to “keep the Maple Leaf flying high.”

“It was a long, hard, bumpy road, but this great country kept me inspired with its beauty, character, and spirit, driving me to keep marching on and devoted to sing about its people and places that make Canada the greatest country in the world,” said Mr. Connors in the message, which was posted to his website. “I must now pass the torch, to all of you, to help keep the Maple Leaf flying high, and be the Patriot Canada needs now and in the future.”

Mr. Connors died in Peterborough, Ont., at the age of 77 from “natural causes,” according to spokesman Brian Edwards.

There are few comparisons to Tom as an artist; even fewer to him as a person. As a musician, he was important in the way that the Ramones or the Velvet Underground were important. He was deeply original; his songs were easy to play; and his work triggered the awakening of a people. In Canadian terms, he was more punk rock than punk itself. In 1978, he burned the remaining copies of Gumboot Clogeroo and gave back his 6 JUNO awards as a protest against the greater Canadian music industry’s treatment of Canadian artists; pandering, as they did, to American and British soundalike bands and encouraging groups to supplant Canadian place names with American locales. As a figure in contemporary pop music, no one dared risk expressing defiance and anger the way Stompin’ Tom did; this coming at a time when it was all about “making it” and “wooing American radio” and getting to the Grand Old Opry. Tom stuck his neck out, and it got stepped on. Or stomped on. But these strong bones we used to build the music of a young nation.

As a person, Tom was strong-willed, funny, driven, tough, playful and giving, if not forgiving; an Ontario cowboy with humble roots and an ego that needed feeding. As a young musician in awe of his talent, he had his sport with me while telling me to keep going. After writing about my encounter with him during his self-imposed exile at the musician’s secret 50th birthday party in Balnifad, Ontario, I saw him a few years later at an EMI music event (he’d signed with the label to record a handful of comeback records). I wasn’t sure whether Tom had read my piece — turned out he’d laminated it and hung it on his basement wall — so I was relucant to see him, fearing the worst. Before leaving the event, I passed by his table. He took one look at me and said: “Bidini, you’ve had to take a lot of s–t from me over the years.” I wasn’t sure how to react. Then my hero came over and hugged me. Tom liked to play both ends, and because we loved him, we let him.

Tom smoked one hundred cigarettes a day and loved to drink beer. On tour, he had to drive the lead truck, and could never be the last person to go to bed. This meant that his band took turns staying up with him. Once, the drummer– a lightweight who’d been given a pass by the rest of the band– was approached by the other players, who told him: “You’ve got to relieve us for a night. We can barely make it through!” The drummer said okay, he’d take one for the team. The morning after his night with Tom, he was admitted to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. Tom went hard, even harder if you were young.

There are so many stories about Tom, maybe half of them true. What we know is this: like the greatest tree in the most majestic forest, the thing we don’t see is the roots. And that’s what Tom was: this country’s roots. People under 30 — heck, under 40 — might not have lived at a time when the tree was a bud, a sapling, a single waving leaf. But this tree was pushed into life by Tom’s devotion to his remarkable and singular craft. Explaining the singer’s legacy to my blank-eyed kids on the morning after his death, I explained: “You know: the guy who does the hockey song!” Soon, they were walking around the room singing it. And so there was no finer a tribute to no finer a man.

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